The Big List of RCG Plugins

Akismet. A must for WP blogs… I’ve complained in the past how their service is somewhat of a blackhole and I can’t seem to rescue a few of the people who leave comments on RCG from the Akismet spam filter. Nonetheless, the service catches hundreds of spam messages every moment. If I didn’t have a life, I could just keep hitting refresh on my spam filter and there would always be another spam message to delete. Matt, if you’re listening... Here are the two improvements I’d like to see. (1) A way to not have spam limited to showing only the most recent 150 spam messages. Recently, I’ve had two different people leave comments who say there were picked up by the spam filter, but because my queue had already built up to greater than 150 messages, I had no way to rescue them. When I hit the “delete all” button, I only (wrongly) reinforced that these people were spam. (2) A way to rescue people who are labeled spam from deep within the blackhole of Akismet’s database. Galen, one of RCG’s contributor’s has to go “save himself” every time he posts. This sucks! (but is better than me dealing with 450 spam messages a day!)

Exec-PHP. Allows for Admin and Editors to write PHP code within their posts… Both dangerous and powerful and the easiest way to get the Archive plugin to work.

Filosofo Comments Preview. This allows for the preview button. I wish I had time to figure out how to format the “preview” page, but I remember spending a whole evening on that one time and not making enough progress, so I just leave it unformatted. It’s ugly, but better than not having the preview option!

Gravatars. This plugin allows me to easily show the author’s photo on the beginning of every post. At one point, I tried to set this up to allow commenters to have their own gravatars (which is the more common use for this plugin), but I couldn’t get it to work with my theme.

Recent Comments. This really nice plugin lets me show the most recent comments on the sidepanel. It is highly configurable and very easy to work with. I attribute the use of this plugin to the high comment level that we get on many RCG posts because it allows everyone to easily seeing where there is “action” on the site…

GeoPress. This allows me to geocode my posts so that they show up over a map. If you haven’t seen this in action, then you’re going to have to wait a little longer. Normally, when you visit adetail page on Anna’s home search tool, a bunch of little rain drops show up that represent blog posts about that location. At the moment, no rain drops are showing up and I suspect this is because of changes to the server during my recent move and Robbie and I never noticed it was broken (until now!). It’s a very cool feature and way under-utilized by me. Note that the author mentions there is a new and improved version of the plugin here.

PhotoPress. This was top-of-the-line when I first started built RCG a year and a half ago. Since then, WP has designed a built-in photo uploaded that is better integrated with the core system. However, I’m stuck on the old photo upload program because I don’t even want to try thinking about reloading all the photos to a new system and getting everything to work. I dread thinking about the day when the PhotoPress people stop updating their code because demand has shrunk. That’s the day I’m going to be forced to hire a developer for this site!

WP-Print. Add a little printer icon next to the post and allows people to print off a clean looking version of the post. I never print articles, but I’ve heard others do, so this is meant to help save a few trees.

Role Manager. This lets me be very picky about what the different contributors can do on the site… Do I want Jon to upload photos but not publish? Do I want to give Ardell all “editor” rights except the ability to run PHP within posts? This plugin handles that kind of thing.

WP-Stats. This page provides a lot of pretty useless stats, but I installed it and have never turned it off… On the day when I decide to award free-round vacation packages to the top 10 WP contributors, I’ll use this plugin because it counts links like number of posts by author and number of comments by author.

Ultimate Tag Warrior. This this is so feature rich, I’ll never even play around with half the options on my beta site. At this point, I’ve been keeping it pretty simple and using the code to tag the bottom of blog posts and create the tag cloud in the archives.

As the Director of Engagement at Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp, Dustin heads up both the event and the social media teams. In addition to managing Rain City Guide, he also manages Credibility Insights and plays hard on his personal blog.

Comments

What plugin are you using to get your author pictures up on the sidebar and in the posts? I read up on Gravatars but it appears that that plugin allows for commenter’s to create avatars as well and I don’t see that happening here. I am not all too technical so perhaps I am just missing something or perhaps this is something I should have my husband help me with but if you could offer a few pointers to get me going in the right direction, I would appreciate it.

I’m using the “gravatars” plugin to upload and organize the photos… and then there is a “call” you can make to grab a photo based on the author’s name. I use that to get the photo to show up at the top of the post.

Note: I added the gravatars plugin in order to show the avatar next to comments, but the formatting got REALLY screwed up and I never spent the time to fix it. Using the gravatar for the posts was an afterthought that turned out to be the main use!

One other question I just thought of. Are you using some sort of meta-data plugin to get your contributors data (website, skype, phone, title) in the sidebar programatically or are you hard coding them into your sidebar template.

Trackbacks

[…] Now, I want a new color scheme. Suggestions? Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, real estate – #Don’t make blog changes in the middle of the day. They are time-consuming and frustrating and betterto be done late at night. – # Prev/Next Posts « Note to self | Home Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 10:16pm […]

[Source: Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide] quoted: Since then, WP has designed a built-in photo uploaded that is better integrated with the core system. However, I’m stuck on the old photo upload program because I don’t even want …

[…] I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5 for both this blog and for http://www.UnusualLife.com and made a few new changes and additions. There was a little trouble with the tags, but other than that, pretty seamless. I took a few hints from Dustin a few weeks ago when he wrote The Big List of RCG Plug-ins, and I added Filosofo Comments Preview and the Recent Comments plug-in. I like that it doesn’t show pingbacks originating from my own blog. […]

[…] Several other real estate bloggers listed their plug-ins awhile back. Here’s the lists from: BloodhoundBlog, Rain City Guide, RealCentralVA and The Future of RE Marketing. Good stuff…. and you can probably find more lists in the comments. […]